


Divinity

by solitarysister



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: 2016 HBB, Alternate Universe, Ancient Civilization, Eventual Smut, Fictional Religion & Theology, HBB, Hannibal Big Bang, M/M, NBC Hannibal Big Bang, NBCHannibalBigBang, Other Additional Tags to Be Added, Reluctant Prophet, Slow Burn, hannibalbigbang, slow start
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-09-21
Updated: 2016-09-21
Packaged: 2018-08-16 12:12:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,934
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8101972
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/solitarysister/pseuds/solitarysister
Summary: Hannibal is a god. Will is his prophet.





	

The god that reigned over the lower regions of the continent was not a merciful one. He thrived on chaos and carnage, fed on pain and suffering. For an age his lands were war torn. His people, begging for an end to it, struck a deal. In return for human sacrifice, he allowed peace and prosperity. For no other deity was there more blood split. 

None defied him, his word was law. It was said even on the mountain, the other gods obeyed him. And his people did the same, adhering to his prophets.

But his prophets were dead and he was silent. His people were left to their own devices, left to forget him. 

A hundred years passed.

The sacrifices stopped. 

The peace continued. 

Life went on.

-

Will made it down the side of the ravine in one piece. Few scrapes and bruises, a bleeding cut on his leg. He was soaked in sweat. His footsteps echoed up the jagged walls mingling with the sounds of whimpering.

The dog's body lay contorted, its back twisted. The spine was visible curling out from beneath bloody fur. Will knelt beside it. Yelping, its front legs fought to stand. For a moment Will thought he might manage it and imagined it so, his little Argos waddling towards him, tail wagging. 

Will snapped the dog's neck. There was no saving it, only prolonging its pain. He was one for quick mercies. Gathering up the broken body, he ignored the blood seeping into his tunic. The climb back up took twice as long. He wouldn't make it home before sundown.

He chose the roads less traveled by, expecting to encounter few so far from the city. To his dismay, there was a steady stream of travellers, all loud and frantic. Some seemed to have packed up their entire houses while others had barely a satchel. Entirely ignorant of local happenings, he didn't understand. Not until he got a bit farther up the mountain. Then he felt the heat on the back of his neck, saw the sparks drifting in the updraft. 

The fields, stretched far as the eye could see, were ablaze. 

-

It was still going strong the next morning. Will sat out on his porch, watching the flames flicker in the distance. Most of his view was obscured by the treetops. He could still see red on the horizon. 

His dogs were out, rolling in the grassy clearing that was his front yard. They'd been trained not to leave it. Argos, young and new, hadn't known any better. He was buried now, laying in his freshly dug grave a bald patch beside the house. There were three more beside it, long overgrown and nourished by the decay. The sight of each filled Will with a different kind of sadness. All four made him want to drink.

So he did. He sipped cheap wine from a chipped cup despite the early hour. High noon sun beating down, he was sober enough to hear twigs snapping underfoot, to see a form moving through the trees. 

"Whole world's on fire and you still won't come down." 

Beverly broke the treeline, grinning and exhausted. She collapsed onto the step beside him. 

"Though it's not exactly an easy journey. I can see why you'd rather stay put."

"That and I'd rather let the fire come to me." He offered the cup. 

She gladly took it. "I don't think you'll have to worry. It's keeping to the fields."

"Sorcery?"

"Something divine." She finished it off, wiping her lip afterwards. "Punishment, they're saying."

Will reached for the bottle. "How many will go hungry?"

"It's too soon to tell."

-

Will managed to down three bottles of the wine. Sufficiently drunk and dazed, he saw the world at a slant. The sun was setting, the trees encircling his cabin casting long shadows. Nostalgia took him back to the first time he'd seen this place. It'd been overgrown, the structure lost to gnarled branches and bold vegetation. It'd taken him a whole spring to clean it out. 

That was, surprisingly, one of the happiest seasons of Will's life. Sleeping out under the stars, or in the empty rooms of his new home on beds of grass that had pushed their way up through the floorboards. He'd been nothing but tired, and hungry, and utterly alone but none of that seemed to matter because his mind was at peace. 

Will laughed now, his breath stinking of fermentation and an otherwise empty stomach. He'd been so naive to think himself cured, to believe that distance could save him from the _curse_ , from the _blood magic_ and _visions_. From everything that had led to his alienation.

He could understand it, the need to be rid of him. Such a strange little boy, always cowering in fear, telling others about this thing they couldn't see. A man and beast combined with hands that stretched to claws, a head laden with antlers, legs that ended in cloven hooves. Materializing from the pitch of shadows, it brought with it the scent of death. 

"It's body is skin and bones," Will would say, "the smell is its own flesh rotting."

Dark things for a child to think up, which is what everyone believed. That these were stories he'd invented in his own ill mind. His parents had tried to convinced him to stop speaking them aloud but Will was afraid and desperate for help. Help he never received. 

With a whistle, he summoned the dogs. They came bounding up the steps, into the glow of the warm light. Will counted them as they brushed past him, following when the sixth crossed the threshold. 

His legs gave beneath him. He only registered that he'd fallen when his cheek connected with the floorboards. With what was left of his rational mind, he tried to decide if he could just stay here. The door was closed but unlocked, the lanterns left to burn themselves out. Unconsciousness crept in, blurring his periphery. Just as his eyes were about to close, he caught sight of it. 

The creature stepped from the dim hall, dropping to a crouch. It approached Will on all fours, almost graceful. He didn't bother to shrink from it. That would only tempt it closer. 

_ I've spent a century waiting. _

Was this the first he'd heard it speak, Will couldn't remember. The voice sounded familiar to him, deep and calm and pleasant. The accent was something he couldn't place but he liked the way it made the words sound.

"For what?" Will slurred. "Waiting for what?"

_ You.  _ _ To be ready. _

"Me? What do you want from me?"

_ Only everything. But I will give you everything in return. _

"What's the point then?" He muttered, doing something like math in his head. "If we end up with the same?"

_ You will not be the same when we are finished.  _

"What'll I be then?"

_ Holy. A prophet.  _

Will snorted, his eyes fluttering shut. "Right, right, ri - "

_ In time, you'll understand. My temple, come to my temple. _

"No," he shook his head with some difficulty. "I don't want to."

_ I will save your countrymen if you do. The fields will go out and grow back tenfold.  _

"I don't care about that."

_ You do. So I offer you a chance to save them. Come to me.  _

Drunken passivity turned to firm resolution. "I would rather burn."

_ That is not an option. _

-

Will woke to the sounds of late morning. In the stillness of the empty house, his dogs having found their own way outside, he could hear the forest around him. Birds were singing, bugs hummed unseen beyond the leaves. He strained for the sound of flames crackling in the distance. There was none. 

Emerging from his home, he scanned the horizon line and saw smoke rising like a thick fog. Later that day he would trek farther up the mountain to get a better look. He would see the fire's absence and the scorched earth, bare and deadened. 

"Ridiculous," he murmured to the littlest of his dogs. He scratched her belly as he sipped some water, now sitting at the edge of the porch. "Prophets and holiness."

Nothing about Will was grand enough to belong in a temple, serving beneath a god. Especially that temple. He remembered it from early childhood, his parents carrying him past to and from the market. The front imposing with its rows of marble pillars, accents of gold leading inwards to the grand hall. There were supposedly humble rooms for the deity's servants but Will was certain he was unfit to live within or near such splendor despite them.

"I don't care." He said as the words filtered back to him through an alcohol logged memory. "I don't care about that."

There was bitterness enough in Will to harden him entirely. He hadn't allowed hardship to numb him quite yet. But the prospect of giving up so much, of giving everything, for people who'd spent years turning their backs on him? 

"I don't want to," he watched the dog prance off to join the group. "I don't care."

-

One week later, Beverly visited again. 

"The livestock have begun to die."

"Disease?"

"None we've seen before. The townspeople are saying it's him."

Guilt averted Will's gaze. Stubbornness held his tongue.

"Gods do have a flare for the dramatic. Though I can't think of anyone more entitled." She put her weight on her walking stick.

"Have they started discussing sacrifices yet?"

"Everyone's too afraid to. It would mean we might actually have to do it." Beverly bit her lip. "It's a foreign concept now. Generations old."

"History repeating." Will sighed, regretfully. "Never anything good."

"Its barbarous." She sat. 

"Strange to think there was a time when it wasn't."

"It always was. People were just desperate. And what's frightening is people are desperate now. Starving, sick, and scared. They'll do anything to survive."

"If you're worried about it being you they pick, don't. You'd be the last chosen."

"No one will be safe." She sat. "There's been talk of a prophet. People saying we shouldn't do anything until there's one to tell us what to do. To guide us."

Will's face twitched, tellingly. Lucky for him, Beverly was lost in thought.

"I doubt anyone would listen if we did. Just another foreign concept."

"Everyone's desperate," she repeated. "That's what religion's for, right?" 

"Something like that."

-

Every two months, Will had to go down into the city for supplies. Even he wasn't ambitious enough to try and live solely off the land. Each visit only lasted a few hours and was scored with judging murmurs (Will could never decide if they were real or imagined).

He'd managed to push this one back a full month, his diet dwindling to liquids and what he could scavenge. He gave the dogs the meat he managed from small traps he set and reset regularly. 

But now he had nothing left. Fall's early morning frost was killing off the edible plants and chasing the smaller, weaker animals down closer the tropical coast (Will fantasized about following them, of beginning a new life on a beach somewhere. But dread, flaring like a burst organ, kept him bound to the mountain. He knew running would be hopeless).

Running was what a good portion of the city was attempting. As Will made his way down, hung with empty bags for carrying and small wooden flask of the last of his beer, he passed people headed up over the peak. As if the shadow of the summit would protect them, should the god wish to lay waste. As if any distance could save them from divine wrath. 

Though he hadn't lived in the city for years and held most clearly the unpleasant memories of only the final few (consisting mostly of his father's declining health and the eagerness of all his neighbors to drive him out), Will felt truly at home there. The familiarity of the way the streets stretched and curved, lined with tight packed tenements until they fell away to the open spaces of a square or a park. The known hum of pedestrian action in the markets as fishermen shouted the prices of their daily catch and street vendors took orders from hungry children. 

Unfamiliar, though, was the smell. Piled high in corners were charred pyres, nothing but bones now. The bones of diseased livestock and poisoned civilians alike. Will learned while eavesdropping that the city's water supply had been tainted. More than a hundred had died in a week. Yes, unfamiliar was the quiet sound of sobs as friends and family knelt by the remains of those they were mourning, hands and faces smeared with the ash. 

Low like a beat beneath it all was the song of those worshiping in the many temples, raising their voices in hymns to the gods. 

No such song came from the largest, most imposing at the city's center. Will didn't dare spare it more than a glance on his way to one particular market. He hugged the sidewalk farthest from the temple's stairs, keeping his head down and his pace quick. Still, he could have swore he felt a cold hand caressing the back of his neck, felt claws carding through the curls there as if in threat to clutch them hard and drag him up the steps. 

It was a relief when he slipped through a crowd of screaming fanatics (trying his best to ignore their radical, religious shouting) and found himself surrounded with familiarity again. Shops for everything one could need; fabrics and jewelry, spices and herbs, wine and cheese. 

Will headed straight for the wine. 

When he left the city limits again, he was loaded up with nearly more than he could carry. His bags now teemed with carefully wrapped loaves of bread and meat, the leaves of his produce peeking out the top and fluttering in the breeze. Under one arm he struggled to carry a crate of glasses bottles, all containing alcohol of some variety, while he used the other to help balance the fish slung over his shoulder. 

As dusk approached the temperature began to drop and there were fewer people to see. Some of the more determined travelers decided to brave the night in hopes of covering more ground. Will pitied them, willing to bet they wouldn't make it to sun up. 

He'd intended to replace some of his clothes and invest in a new pair of shoes. Time had gotten the better of him though, the low hanging sun telling him he'd needed to head back up. 

This was a terrible mistake, one Will recognized when the strap of his right sandal snapped. Without its support, his foot slid from the sole and his balance went with it. He managed to catch himself on one knee, scraping it badly against the coarse ground. He didn't manage to catch all he was carrying, though. 

The fish hit the dirt, the knotted rope threaded through their hollow gills keeping them together. Will felt a sickening lurch of his stomach as his crate tipped, bottles shattering and soaking the earth with his purchases. 

Will cursed, struggling to stand under the weight of all that still hung from him. Clumsily, he tried to bend to the side, reaching. The weight of his produce shifted and nearly sent him toppling once more

"Steady now." 

Someone touched Will at the shoulder and he lurched away. This only worsened his balance, sending his free hand grasping for the stranger on instinct. 

A strong hand caught his wrist, the other finding his side. They allowed Will the opportunity he needed to center himself. The hands fell away and softly the stranger spoke. 

"I did not mean - "

"Yeah, no. It's fine. I just, I startle easy."

"Who can blame you in times like these?"

Will squinted at the stranger, the sky nearly black overhead now. He was put together cleanly, his tunic unsmudged by dirt or soot. Long, woven braids fell down his back and over his shoulders, each decorated with glinting metal clasps.  

"Let me help." The stranger offered.

"I got it," Will huffed, tempted to swat his hand away bluntly. Remembering his manners he added, flatly, "thanks."

"You're like this with everyone then."

Will blinked. "What?"

"I saw you earlier in town mistreating that poor fish merchant."

"Oh. Well, he was overcharging."

"Hard times for us all, you can hardly bl - "

"Yeah," Will snapped, trying and failing to avoid the guilt that pulled in his chest. "Yeah, I guess you're right."

"Shame to see the city in such a state." The man looked back down the forest road.

Will, without tipping over, managed to get a grip on the fish. He hoisted them up, feeling the light brush of the stranger's fingers on his as the man held his hands ready to assist.  

"Yeah. A real shame."

"I've known this place for quite a long time. And for all my power I find I am powerless to change its current circumstance. I find myself wishing there were something I could do."

"Well, there's nothing so," Will shifted under the burden. 

"There's always something. If not me then someone else."

"Everyone loves a martyr." 

The stranger frowned at the bitterness in his voice. "You misunderstand. When a god speaks like this, through action and calamity, it's because he lacks a proper voice. Someone to translate his meanings, to commune with him and know him so that he might be understood. That's what we need. A prophet."

"Someone to give themselves up," Will glares openly at him. "To live like a recluse in that abandoned temple, praying to something that has done nothing but take from us. Serving it and living for it. That's not a prophet but you're right that's not a martyr either. It's a sacrifice."

The man gave him a curious look. "You know so little and yet place such belief in your words. With blind faith like that you'd make a most remarkable zealot."

"I don't believe in anything. An opinion doesn't require faith and I," Will heaved his crate up to balance on his hip, "don't require your help."

Will stormed off as best he could, his leg's range of motion limited. His cheeks burned faintly with the heat of his rage, blood roaring in his ears. He almost didn't hear the stranger calling out behind him. 

"You're already living like a recluse, Will. You've already given yourself up to a different kind of god."

-

Will sat at his kitchen table picking glass from his palm. Anger made him hasty and as he was clear out the crate, he'd managed to shatter another of the bottles. Luckily, the wound had essentially cleaned itself. 

_. . . a different kind of god.  _

"What the fuck does that even mean?" Will muttered to himself, wincing as he widened the wound near the base of his thumb. Blood ran in a neat rivulet down the blue veins of his wrist.  He stared blankly, his vision blurring.

Loneliness was like a god, he could concede. It differed from simple isolation, from being alone. Will knew alone in all its different forms and he knew loneliness even better. It was hollowness, a dull ache. It was a void at his center. 

If that was what the stranger (Will wasn't going to acknowledge him as anything else, though the implication was clear in the man knowing his name, in his appearing so suddenly and feeling so familiar) meant, Will could admit he was right. Really, would it be so different? The temple was vast and he would never leave it. (Adhering to the region's traditions. The only human interaction he would have would be with his errand boys, with those that came to present him with gifts and with prayers, and with the masses should a prophecy need to be given.)

He finished with his hand, bandaging it carelessly (if he died of infection, then he wouldn't have to worry anymore). His dogs were outside running themselves ragged, darting in and out of the light his house gave off. He watched with calming contentment as they frolicked and wrestled. 

Nibbling on an apple, Will stepped out into the cool evening air and whistled. The dogs all stopped, as if possessed, their ears perking up, their heads turning. He held the door open and they understood. 

They seemed excited tonight, scrambling up the porch stairs with too much energy. Will watched them go, counting them as they tripping over the threshold in pairs. One, then two, then two, then . . . two. 

Will frowned, nearly certain he wasn't drunk enough to be seeing double. In fact, he wasn't drunk at all. Another dog followed, leaving behind a heavy trail of dirt and bringing the total up to eight. Two more than he owned. 

As ninth appeared he bend down and scooped the dog into his arms. He expected it to fight him, to squirm and bite. Instead, the lower half of his face was assaulted with sloppy, wet kisses. The puppy scrambled at his shoulder so that Will couldn't get a good look at him. 

"Down! Down, you little - " Will huffed, gripping its scruff gently. The dog yipped happily slumping backwards in his arms. Will recognized that bark even before he saw its face. 

"Argos."

The little puppy barked again at his name, his tail wagging. Images of a broken spine and blood matted fur flashed forward from Will's memory, the whimpers and the sickening snap of the dog's neck beneath his hands. Will's body dipped as he knees threatened to go and wisely, he set Argos down before he could drop him. 

Only when he'd waddled away did Will realize that like the two before, Argos was covered in dirt. His tunic was smeared with it, his neck and arm too. 

There were four graves at the side of his house. There were three dead dogs who'd dug themselves up. Hope gathered in his throat as a cruel lump, choking him as he scanned the clearing. His heart crawled up to join it when he saw a silhouette approaching. 

Winston emerged from the shadows, pausing with his paws on the first step. Will's heart swelled and burst and broke all at once. 

-

Will sat on the edge of his bed, staring at his sleeping pack. He reminded himself one more time that they were all alive, all living. They appeared so still in slumber, he felt uneasy allowing them to continue without checking their vitals. 

Without preamble, clawed hands curled over his shoulders, clenching just enough to make Will flinch. The weight of the creature's body pressed solidly against his back. Its antlers cast shadows on the floor and it looked almost as if they sprang from Will's own head. 

_A gift._ It murmured. _Do you like it?_

"It's cruel leverage." Will said plainly. He couldn't muster the malice. "I can't say no, can I?"

_ If you do, you'll have to bury them all. _

"No, that's not what I . . . You won't stop. I can't say no."

The creature gave no response, the answering hanging clearly in the air. 

"If I come to you," Will felt a tightness in his chest, "I can't bring them. I can't keep them."

_ You'll have no need of them. Of any possessions. _

"I'll become one myself. A possession."

_ You will be so much more. You'll want for nothing. You'll leave this world behind. _

"I need time."

_Then time you shall have. Five days to get your affairs in order._

Will swallowed, new tears glazing his eyes. "Five days."

 

**Author's Note:**

> So our "stranger" basically looks like a prissier version of [this guy](https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/67/ab/5a/67ab5a8d0cebe52d9b38aac5faa5d681.jpg)


End file.
